The condition of market dependency

The best that socialists can do is to aim as much as possible to detach social life from market-dependence. That means striving for the decommodification of as many spheres of life as possible and their democratization—not just their subjection to the political rule of “formal” democracy but their removal from the direct control of capital and from the “impersonal” control of market imperatives, which subordinate every human need and practice to the requirements of accumulation and profit-maximization. If that seems utopian, just consider how unrealistic it is to adopt a strategy of export-oriented competitiveness in a crisis-ridden global economy with an irreducible structural tendency to overcapacity.

Open source production is ‘market dependent’, how can we make it more ‘market independent’?

For this query, the distinctions introduced by Ellen Meiksins Wood have undoubted relevance.

I’ve been arguing for a long time that we need to think of the capitalist market not as an opportunity but as an imperative.1 I’ve also argued that, as familiar as this idea may seem to Marxists, we haven’t been consistent in pursuing all its implications. So let me briefly go over the basic argument again, before moving on to some of its political implications.

To understand the market as imperative, we have to understand not just how people have been able to respond to the capitalist market but how they have been forced to do so. Capitalism doesn’t just allow people to avail themselves of the market in the pursuit of profit. It forces them to enter the market for the most basic conditions of survival and self-reproduction—and that applies to both workers and capitalists.

In conditions where the market has this historically unprecedented role in organizing human life and social reproduction, where people must go through the market to gain access to the most basic means of self-reproduction, the provision of all goods and services is governed by certain imperatives: the imperatives of competition, accumulation, profit-maximization, and increasing labor productivity. Under such conditions, producing use values becomes just an inconvenient medium for generating exchange value, so the primary objective of capitalist production is not the provision of goods and services at all but the self-expansion of capital. Human needs and wants are always subordinate to capital accumulation and subject to all the crises and contradictions associated with an anarchic competitive market.

No other system of class exploitation has been mediated by the market or driven by its specific imperatives. In pre-capitalist societies, the market was not the medium of self-reproduction, for either direct producers or exploiters. Direct producers were generally in possession of the means of production—typically peasants in possession of land—and exploitation took the form of direct surplus extraction by coercive force. To increase their surpluses, exploiters needed to improve not the productivity of the producers’ labor so much as the effectiveness of their own coercive powers of appropriation.

Only capitalism has a system of exploitation in which exploiters depend on the market to gain access to labor power and to realize their profits. Only capitalist appropriation depends on market competition and therefore on the systematic improvement of labor productivity. Only capitalism, then, depends on constantly improving the forces of production. And only in capitalism is it necessary to grow just to stay in the same place.

Let me now formulate my argument about opportunities and imperatives in a slightly different way. Let me suggest that there’s a fundamental difference between saying that people in capitalist society are market-dependent and saying that they’re market-enabled. For example, conventional explanations of how capitalism emerged talk about how the market itself was enabled, how the market was liberated to grow and to operate freely according to its own internal principles, once impediments had been removed.2When that happened, these arguments suggest, people were enabled, they were empowered, by the market: given unimpeded access to the market, they were enabled to pursue their own interests, to achieve prosperity by hard work or commercial skill, to supply society’s needs and wants in the most efficient way.

Now you might think that Marxists would never say that people were market-enabled in that way. But Marxism too has produced its own versions of the conventional account, explaining how capitalism emerged when the bourgeoisie, or, in other versions, rural commodity producers, were freed from feudal constraints. We’re told more about how people were enabled to avail themselves of market opportunities than about how they came to be market-dependent and subject to market imperatives.”

WRITTEN BY

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is the founder and president of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Bauwens travels extensively giving workshops and lectures on P2P and the Commons as emergent paradigms and the opportunities they present to move towards a post-capitalist world.
In the first semester of 2014, Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create policies for a 'social knowledge economy'.
In January 2015 CommonsTransition.org was launched. Commons Transition builds on the work of the FLOK Society and features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these policy documents. Commons Transition aims toward a society of the Commons that would enable a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally stable world. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics.